GameSim is a speacialist outsourcer for engineering services and boasts such clients as Electronic Arts and the US Department of Defence. Founder Andrew Tosh will remain with the company along with its 30 employees.

"It is exciting for GameSim to enter a new chapter as Keywords' first engineering studio," said Tosh in a statement. "GameSim will take advantage of synergies with other Keywords studios to better service our customers in the video gaming, military simulation & training, and geospatial visualization industries.”

This could be seen as a bit of a spending spree for Keywords who also announced the aquisition of XLOC last week, with an aim to grow the groups ability to provide end-to-end services for their clients.

"The acquisition of GameSim is an entry point into outsourced software engineering services and is highly complementary to our existing essential services to game developers and publishers around the world, said Keywords chief executive, Andrew Day. "Our intention is to use this as a platform from which to build a market leading engineering capability and we continue to review a number of compelling acquisition opportunities in this specialist and large, yet fragmented market.

"These engineering services combine particularly strongly with our art creation services but are also synergistic with our localisation and testing businesses in which game development skills can be deployed to increase automation and to integrate our services more directly with client side systems and processes."